Personal Stories

The United Press' earnest, efficient Horace Quigg, who entered Manila with MacArthur, had just bedded for the night on the concrete floor of Manila's Bilibid Prison. Then he learned that some U.S. prisoners, newly freed, were on the other side of the wall. He felt his way down blacked-out corridors. "Suddenly I sensed rather than felt or saw someone beside me," he wrote. "I stuck out my hand, even as did Stanley in darkest Africa. . . 'I'm Quigg, United Press,' I said. The Dr. Livingstone of Bilibid Prison grasped my hand fervently. 'Weissblatt, United Press,' he replied." No one in Manila begrudged Correspondent Quigg this bit of Richard Harding Davis exuberance. For in Manila last week, the men who gather news were themselves news, and many a correspondent felt personal as well as professional excitement. At least five who entered the city with the conquering troops had witnessed American defeat in the Philippines three years ago. And from Japanese prison camps came eleven correspondents, emaciated and ailing, with the pent-up knowledge of three years' hell to report. Among them: P: The U.P.'s Franz Weissblatt, 46, only U.S. correspondent captured in battle by the Japanese. For three years Weissblatt, shut up in Bilibid Prison, was only four blocks from his wife, in Santo Tomas internment camp, but was never permitted to see her.

P:the New York Times's Ford Wilkins, who, after his rescue, reported in the Times's traditional, starched third person that "the writer gained five pounds in 48 hours."

P:The U.P.'s Robert Crabb, who with his wife and a boy and girl born during their internment were among 3,700 freed at Santo Tomas. He wrote: "Hundreds of us wept unashamed when the Stars & Stripes was run up. . . ." P: NBC Correspondent Bert Silen, who began his first broadcast with an inevitable wisecrack: "As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted over three years and a month ago. . . ."

Most anxious of newsmen returning to Manila was the U.P.'s Frank Hewlett, whose wife had stayed behind as a nurse when he left for Bataan and Corregidor with General MacArthur on New Year's Eve, 1941. Self-effacing Reporter Hewlett, in the middle of a long dispatch, reported simply: "I found [my wife] today, recovering from a nervous breakdown. . . . Her weight had dropped to 80 pounds. But I found her in excellent spirits. It was a reunion after years about which I do not want to think."

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